Miscellaneous

“Fairness, idealism and other atrocities” from the LA Times.

Please note that the headline follows journalistic rules. If this were part of an English sentence, it should read idealism, and. In other words, all parts of a list, even the one before “and,” needs a punctuation mark, either a comma or a period, if it’s the last one.

English Stumbles:

Logic and the English language: “There is no egg in eggplant…”

Speech Accent archive- Hear folks from different places read.

Interesting facts of English words has some “facts” I’m not so sure of… How, for instance, do they know that apple and gold are 14,000 years old in a language that didn’t get written and no one speaks? But some of it is relevant and interesting to me.

A rhyming English poem. It’s called “English is Tough Stuff.” Get it? It’s rhyming but spelled differently.

I read an interesting discussion of professorial advocacy. It is clear that the article is written from a liberal standpoint because it says that conservatives don’t like it when liberals use the classroom to discuss religious and moral questions but are okay with advocacy when they are promoting humanitarian values.

First, for the educator to take a neutral stance on such issues would tend to give students the relativistic message that no answers are better or closer to the truth than any others regarding moral, political, and religious questions.

Basically this article argues that is good for my students to know where and why I stand where I do on controversial issues that are touched on in class. It’s an interesting idea.

How the Lord of the Rings Should Have Ended.

A wonderful studying tool, the Elizabethan Authors Homepage. Lots of guys I haven’t heard of and, of necessity then, have not read.

A Shakespeare site which gives interesting and different information than the one I used for Brit Lit I. I’ll have to keep it in mind. The interesting thing I learned? The average age for marriage during the Renaissance was the middle to late 20s. Folks were way older then than my parents or R’s parents.

Vlad the Impaler offers a discussion of differences between Vlad and Dracula, among other things. If I ever teach Dracula, this would be a fun site to start with.

Very cool! A superstitions database. I like it. Wonder if I can still use this in my new and improved writing class in the fall.

Murphy’s Laws of Teaching which made me laugh.

A subject interesting to the teacher will bore students.
The time a teacher takes in explaining is inversely proportional to the information retained by students.
…
Students who are doing better are credited with working harder. If children start to do poorly, the teacher will be blamed.
…
The more studying you did for the exam, the less sure you are as to which answer they want
…
The book or periodical most vital to the completion of your term paper will be missing from the library.
Corollary: If it is available, the most important page will be torn out.
[Note: This is why my students need copies of all the articles or books they are going to use for their term papers. That way it won't matter if the computer has crashed, or whatever.]
…

No matter how much you study for a test you will be asked a question that you don’t know.
…
You just finished the paper that counts as your final five minutes before class only to discover the printer is out of ink
[Exactly. That's why I tell them not to do that.]
…

Reading on the Web was an interesting tidbit on how people scan rather than read and what kind of text improves their memory.

The Quotations Page opened to Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame), which made it much more interesting to me than if it had opened, for example, to Lin Yutang, who I had never heard of before. Whoever did the pages is a big Adams’ fan.

Since I said I liked the Quotations Page, Stumble sent me to Quotes on Writers and Writing. I liked it, too.

I wanted to nominate the top 10 Sci Fi stories, but apparently I couldn’t click on 10 no matter how many times I counted.

Advice to Writers by Vonnegut was very useful. Even though I am not a big Vonnegut fan, I liked this set. Maybe I should share it with my freshman comp classes.

Fairy Tales Collection. And what would happen if all your wishes came true?

Another Kurt Vonnegut on writing site. Eight rules. Here are two.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

…Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

How odd. This, almost word for word, is a handout I give out for literary analysis. At least it is the beginning of it. I don’t remember who I got it from, but since I was using it 20 years ago, I’m sure it wasn’t this website. I wonder where they got it from?

A free ebook library. The Burgomeister “loans” you his books and you delete them when you’ve read them.

Folger’s Shakespeare Library with lesson plans for the plays!

The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies includes info for the non-specialist and teaching references, including syllabi. It has some good stuff, but some is gone and some isn’t readable on Firefox.

The teacher’s. Orson Scott Card, a favorite author in our family, assigned a paper in a Contemporary American Novel class for the students to write about their interaction with American culture.

As I read these fascinating papers, however, I began to synthesize something from the things they had written about. Student after student inadvertently told stories about decisions their parents had made.

A surprising number of them had been home schooled, and the experiences they described suggested parents who wanted to raise open-minded children who were not afraid of learning anything.

And an even more surprising number of them told of choices their parents had made which, as children, my students had simply taken for granted.

Of course their father had taken a relatively low-paying job and sacrificed any thought of a prominent career, in order that his kids could grow up in a small town.

Of course the parents had moved, not to a richer neighborhood, but to a more family-friendly one. Or from one town to another to get them away from negative influences.

Above all, many of these parents had chosen to accept a lower standard of living so that their children could grow up with at least one parent always in the home, and both parents easily accessible to their children all the time.

They had seen what they believed was good for their children, and they had done it, seemingly without regard for society’s expectations.

He decided to give up teaching college three days a week because he was not home for his teenage daughter during those days.

It’s at the end of this page.

May I just say that it is sometimes hard to choose to stay home. I’ve been wrestling with the weight of debt relief versus at-home parenting. I will say that God took the decision out of my hands. Someone else got the jobs I was applying for.

Article on Card found at Happy Catholic.

Go, quickly, to Stanford University’s A Fair(y) Use Tale to see what it is and why we need it. Do it now. Before Disney gets rid of it.

The windows don’t open in my classroom, so if a gunman comes down the hall, I can’t tell the students to go out while I try and slow him down. (Thank God for Professor Librescu.)

But I do keep the door locked, so we could close it. And even a shoe under the door would wedge it closed, even if the gunman had a key.

There are TVs and chairs we could put against the door (though the charis are very light) and then we could go to the other side of the wall and lay down flat. The walls are thin and bullets could go through and hurt someone.

The windows might be broken open. We’re on the second floor, but even glass and broken legs are better than death.

There are two exits. We’re very near one. It might be that we could get out the other.

My students and I talked about this. It is better to be prepared.

I told them that, in all likelihood, Professor Librescu had thought all his life about what he would do if “they” came for him again. And that forethought is what allowed his students to get out the window.

How would you get out of your work room?

From Reading in Bed ed. by Steven Gilbar

“Books” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“College education is the reading of certain books which the common-sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already accumulated.”

“As whole nations have derived their culture form a single book- as the Bible has been the literature as well as the religion of large parts of Europe…. [P]erhaps, the human mind would be a gainer, if all the secondary writers were lost- say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon…”

“Reading at Walden” by Henry David Thoreau

“I believe that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature…”

“Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics. …to keep up and add to his English …. is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for this purpose.”

Ouch. And I appear to have lost all my other Thoreau quotes. I don’t know that I want to go back and redo them, so these may be all you see.

Turns out, I had my Thoreau quotes. But I didn’t become aware of that until I had gone back over his essay and recopied the ones I liked the best. Then, as I was going through and changing things to italics so that my comments were clearly differentiated from quotes, I found that my “Emerson” entry was really a Thoreau entry, but with the wrong title. DANG IT.

I’ll probably go fix it, since I went to fix Thoreau. Surely Emerson deserves equal time?

is a blog for teachers. It’s not terribly funny, but it is terribly true.